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The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

2022; Volume: 9; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21568030.9.1.22

2156-8030

Amy DeRogatis,

Archaeology and Natural History

A little over a year ago I was in the Clarke Historical Library in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, sifting through documents with librarian John T. Fierst to answer a nagging question regarding the provenance of a remarkable daguerreotype. As we were musing about the limits of what could be known about this material object, he happened to mention that another person who was finishing a book about James Jesse Strang had recently visited and looked at the photograph. Like any other academic hearing about scholarly competition, my heart froze, and out of my dry mouth I managed to croak, “Oh, really, who was that?” When he said “Miles Harvey,” my brain raced. I knew the name but could not place it among any scholars of early Mormonism, or of North American religious history, or anyone else in the field of religious studies. But I knew the name.As soon as I was able, with as much dignity as I could muster, I threw open my laptop and Googled him. Of course, Miles Harvey, the author of a book I adored, The Island of Lost Maps. How did I feel about learning that an author I deeply admired was about to publish a book on a subject that I had been researching on and off for years? Conflicted. On the one hand, I have always thought that the extraordinary story of James Jesse Strang was worthy of broad audience, and I could think of few other writers who would be able to bring to life such a colorful historical figure. On the other hand, who wants their academic writing to be compared to a biography written for a general audience by a talented author?This is a tension I imagine many readers of this journal will experience when reading The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreams, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch. Some will delight in Harvey's deft handling of a lesser-known nineteenth-century Mormon leader, particularly his ability to embed Strang in popular culture and especially the literature of his time. Others will object to generalizations, gaps in historical knowledge and recent scholarship on early Mormonism, and most significantly, his insistence that Strang should be understood as a fraudulent religious leader—in short, a confidence man.The King of Confidence is a biography of James Jesse Strang (1813–1856), a charismatic religious leader who surfaced during the succession crisis after the death of Joseph Smith in 1844. A recent and unlikely convert, Strang led a small group of Mormons to establish a community near Burlington, Wisconsin, and later moved them to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan where he established a millennial kingdom and crowned himself “King of Heaven and Earth.” Strang based his authority on a highly contested “Letter of Appointment” signed by Joseph Smith, as well as revelatory experiences of seeing and speaking with angels and finding and translating new scripture. While on Beaver Island, Strang built a temple, established the Law of the Lord for both believers and gentiles (as non-Mormon residents were called), and, although he had previously made vehement anti-polygamy statements (while secretly married to his second wife), he eventually instituted plural marriage.As a teenager, Strang wrote in a secret diary his ambition to become “a Priest, a Lawyer, a Conqueror, and a Legislator” (17). Following that dream, he successfully petitioned the Michigan State Legislature in Lansing to shift voting lines based on changed demographics and was subsequently twice elected to the Michigan House of Representatives. Scholars who study Strang like to quip that he was the only monarch ever elected to serve in the United States government. For many reasons, however, he angered gentiles living on Beaver Island, Mackinac Island, and in northern Michigan towns. Just six years after he was crowned king, a few disaffected followers, with the implicit support of the federal government, assassinated him in 1856. Within a few weeks, all of his followers were forcibly removed from the island and their land and property repossessed by a mob that pushed them out at gunpoint and left them in towns along the Lake Michigan shoreline.Strang and his religious experiment have been the subject of a few biographical and historical studies. For the most part, the scholarship focuses on Strang's biography, the rise and fall of the Strangite community, and Strang's place in early Mormon and regional history. The canon of Strang books include: Don Faber, James Jesse Strang: The Rise and Fall of Michigan's Mormon King; Vickie Cleverley Speek, “God Has Made Us a Kingdom”: James Strang and the Midwest Mormons; Roger Van Nord, King of Beaver Island: The Life and Assassination of James Jesse Strang; Doyle C. Fitzpatrick, The King Strang Story: A Vindication of James J. Strang, the Beaver Island Mormon King; and Milo M. Quaife, The Kingdom of St. James: A Narrative of the Mormons.1 Harvey mines many of the same primary sources and references the secondary sources listed above to produce an engaging read that situates Strang as the quintessential representative of his cultural and historical moment.Each short chapter is headed “In which our author . . . ” putting the reader in the historical mindset with a literary convention popular during Strang's life. In The King of Confidence, Strang is not simply the ambitious religious leader whose short-lived millennial kingdom ended tragically; he is “a kind of lightning rod for all the fierce enthusiasms and vibrant social movements of the antebellum era” (310). Throughout the book, Harvey succeeds in relating Strang and his followers to multiple aspects of White antebellum society and culture. He also draws connections between Strang and the role of new technologies like photography, telegraphy, and forms of media communication such as newspaper “exchange networks,” social reforms such as abolition, dress reform, utopian movements, and socialism, as well as the rise of self-invented celebrities in the nineteenth century known as “go-ahead men.” Unsurprisingly, P. T. Barnum looms large in this book. Harvey further finds parallels to Strang and his followers in nineteenth-century literary works written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Percy Shelley, but no one more than Herman Melville.Melville's book The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was published the year after Strang's assassination. The title's main character—the confidence man—provides what Harvey suggests is the fictional equivalent for the historical Strang. In fact, Harvey notes the tantalizing possibility that Melville might have been aware of Strang while writing his book (297). The novel serves as the overarching explanation for who Strang was and why people followed him. Indeed, a clever reader will note that many of the chapters in Melville's book begin with the heading “in which the . . . ,” just as Harvey's chapters do. In Harvey's telling, Strang is the ultimate confidence man: a religious fraud who duped people into believing him based on his charisma, his ability to promote himself, and his uncanny talent to land on his feet.This explanatory approach to a new religious movement is not surprising, but it is flawed and unsatisfying. Questions of “true” religion and “true” belief tell us little about why following Strang and building a religious community was meaningful for the movement's adherents. I wondered, for example, Why is there little mention of religious practices in this book? What was the unique religious worldview that Strang offered that led people to move to a remote island in the middle of Lake Michigan? Is it possible that everyone was duped by Strang, and what does that mean for the people who voluntarily remained in the community even after problems arose? How does one ascertain through literary and historical evidence that a religious belief or practice is fraudulent? These are not new questions for scholars of new religious movements, and they will be familiar to scholars of early Mormonism. Fraud is an easy explanation for a complicated, human dynamic that ultimately cannot be boiled down to true or false belief.What I appreciate most about The King of Confidence is Miles Harvey's corrective to James Jesse Strang's place in history. Rather than presenting him as a fringe actor in the drama of early Mormon succession, or as an idiosyncratic failed antebellum religious leader, Harvey demonstrates that Strang was a person very much of his time and therefore should be understood as representative of currents in the mainstream of White antebellum America. Harvey's enormous talent is evident in his ability to link culture, technology, and literature to Strang's biography in an entertaining read.What I did not appreciate about this book was the author's insistence that Strang was a con man who peddled fake religion and the people who followed him were victims of his grand deception. That approach does not tell us anything about what participating in this religious movement was like and why it was meaningful for the members. It also does not leave any room for the possibility that Strang believed what he claimed. A more nuanced approach that recognizes the possibility of flawed but sincere people would provide a less cynical view of Strang and his followers and perhaps would tell us a bit more about what motivated that particular group of people to follow a prophet and build a millennial kingdom on an island in the middle of Lake Michigan in the early nineteenth century.